Army Staff Sgt. Ben Parker disposed of more than 250 IEDs on two tours of duty in Afghanistan. / The Enquirer/Tony Jones

Written by

Army Staff Sgt. Ben Parker’s job is one of the most solitary on Earth.

When he arrives on scene, everyone else moves away. When he makes a decision, everyone else gives way. When he sets to work, everyone else stays away.

Sgt. Parker is a bomb tech. He is the nameless, faceless soldier wrapped in 80 pounds of Kevlar and steel plates whose job is not to take lives, but to save them.

In two tours of duty in Afghanistan, the 25-year-old Montgomery native has defused or safely detonated more than 300 IEDs, the explosive devices responsible for more than 80 percent of the fatalities in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Two bronze stars attest to his bravery. His safe return from deployments attests to his skill.

At Veterans Day services today Blue Ash City Council members will announce the addition of a 13th statue to Blue Ash’s highly visited Veterans Memorial – an explosive ordnance disposal specialist, clad in a bomb suit, to represent veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

They chose it with Ben Parker in mind.

Last July, Sgt. Parker and his father, Dave Parker, also of Montgomery, asked the council to consider the EOD statue because of the diversity bomb techs represent. The specialists come from all four military branches, are male and female, officers and enlisted, and are among the most highly regarded troops of the current conflicts.

As he ended his remarks to council, Ben Parker held up an enlarged photo of himself defusing an IED. Council members say they couldn’t forget it.

“It was, ‘There’s the iconic image of the War on Terror,’” said Councilman Rick Bryan. “What struck me most about Ben was that he isn’t doing it for Ben, but for the people of this country. I thought, here’s a person willing to sacrifice his life for me – you just have to put a period there. He’s a remarkable man.”

At Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where EOD techs spend 10 months in intensive training, half of enrollees wash out before graduation. Those who make it through are a blend of risk-taker and well-trained machine, gutsy enough to stare 100 pounds of explosives in the face and disciplined enough not to let the bomb – or anything else – distract them.

(Page 2 of 3)

“There are plenty of times I’ve worked with crowds around, and I can promise you the people who put that IED in the ground are in that crowd – or if it’s remote controlled, the guy who’s going to detonate it is in that crowd,” Parker said.

Lives hang on the bomb tech’s ability to focus. From the moment he walks onto an IED site, he is legally responsible for every person present, not only U.S. military members, but Afghan troops, police and civilians. The decision on what to do with the device – disarm it, disassemble the parts and detonate them or blow it up in place – rests solely with him.

“If you’re indecisive on an IED site, you put your team at risk and the locals at risk,” he said. “You have to be able to make the hard choices.”

In Afghanistan, Parker worked on explosives planted everywhere – along roadways, in fields, in animal carcasses, in vehicles. While techs sometimes use robots to blow up devices, they dismantle most in order to collect evidence and look for patterns in their construction.

They spend years perfecting their skills. Still, they know their survival depends on assuming nothing.

“Three times you see an IED put in the same spot, but that third time, the insurgents have been able to see how we react, so they’re going to change it,” Sgt. Parker said. “If you’re going to the same site and you say, ‘I’m going to do what I did before,’ that’s when something bad happens.”

The 2005 graduate of Sycamore High School who was an Eagle Scout and co-captain of his water polo and swim teams, Sgt. Parker spent hours working on cars as a teenager, including rebuilding the engine of his Nissan Sentra. “He’s always been reliable, always gave you his best effort, always cool under pressure,” his father said.

In Afghanistan – where temperatures are sometimes so high and the bomb suit so hot that techs sweat straight through their boots – Sgt. Parker sang Foreigner and Journey songs while he dismantled bombs to stay focused and loose. In May 2010 he was slightly injured – EOD units call it “getting bit” – by a remotely controlled device while he was sweeping a road for explosives. But the incident he remembers most took place at the entrance to a U.S. base on the Pakistani border. There, insurgents had attached explosives to two vehicles, one suicide bomber killed himself detonating a device and a second had been shot before he was able to.

(Page 3 of 3)

Besides clearing the vehicles and collecting evidence from the first explosion, Sgt. Parker’s job was to defuse the bombs attached to the second bomber’s vest. To do it, he had to work directly over the dead man’s body.

“I’ll never forget his face – the clouds that your pupils form after you pass away,” he said. “But even though this person’s sole purpose was to kill American personnel, it would not have been right to blow up that body.”

After decades of civil war and international conflict, Afghans are weary of fighting and wary of foreign forces. After rendering an IED safe, Sgt. Parker often takes off his bomb suit and passes out water to the villagers and candy to their children.

“We’d try to make them understand what happened, why we were there and why there was an explosion,” he said. “I like to mingle with the local people, see the kids. The goal is for them to have a happy life.”

Stationed at Fort Carson, Colo., since returning from his second deployment in June, he says he’ll return to Afghanistan a third time if needed. “I would go. I’d absolutely go.”

He says it knowing EOD specialists’ chances of returning alive fall with each additional deployment and that at least 117 have not come home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is the reason that each time he left his truck to start the walk to an IED Sgt. Parker got down on one knee and prayed. He thanked God for his life, family and blessings. “Then I prayed that if this was the last 10 or 15 minutes of my life that my family would know I was killed doing what I love, trying to make things better.”

His mother, Vicki Moseley of Montgomery, says her son’s career path has seemed destined. “I truly believe God had a plan for Ben, and Ben is one of the rare people who heard his calling.”